


Red Days

by a_strange_bit_of_something



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: Assassination, Blood, Brainwashing, Confusion, F/M, Memories, Memory Alteration, Past Brainwashing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-29
Updated: 2014-08-29
Packaged: 2018-02-15 07:53:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2221353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_strange_bit_of_something/pseuds/a_strange_bit_of_something
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She had red hair: red like stars, red like blood, red like a memory.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red Days

They worked well together—the Widow and him. She handled the details: the finer points of espionage and infiltration. He saw to the dirt: the grislier pieces that didn’t go in the logbooks. Wetworks, they called them, because of all the blood, he supposed. The Widow always seemed to find that name funny.  
It was only logical that they’d work just as well off the field, the few times their paths aligned for a day, two, three, a week. He wouldn’t call it love. Couldn’t. The partnership between them that had deepened into something else wasn’t so much an attraction of people as an instant of mutual need. The reasons he doubted he would ever be able to fully understand. Once he had tried to put it into words, when they were alone in a place he didn’t know or cared to know. She had placed her finger over his lips and simply stared, and perhaps that spoke more than any word ever could.  
Sometimes he thought he found the answer right in front of him in the way she pursed her lips when angry. The way she lowered the gun after she killed. How her face looked, how it felt with blood splatters across her cheeks. Then, maybe, he understood.  
The Widow was cold. Like him. Except for her hair. Her hair was a bright blaze, a stain, like blood, across her person. He liked to tangle his hand in it when they sat together as she traced the red star in the metal of his arm with her finger.  
She’d said something once—the Widow—something important that he could no longer remember. It troubled him. Something about choices.  
Their paths no longer crossed after that. Once he asked about her to one of the men in suits, the important ones who never raised their voice and leaned in when they spoke so that he felt their breath on his face. They put him to sleep early.  
When they brought him back—he didn’t know when—it no longer seemed to matter.  
They sent him to a place that left echoes in his head. They chased him down the streets, across rooftops, through alleys, and when he pulled the trigger, it was as much to quiet them as to finish the mission.  
He got lost afterwards, wandering the dark streets under dark sky with too many dark thoughts. Something about a face. A man, a man with blond hair and a handsome face and a sad smile. The man wasn’t a mission; those faces he knew. And something about his eyes, the way the light hit his eyes, placed him somewhere far, somewhere separate from himself and cold metal and blood in his mouth.  
They found him and shipped him back, plugged him, let him sleep.  
He longed for sleep without cold, without the whir and grinding of the machines. He closed his eyes and dreamed of blood stars and blood hair.  
She came back.  
It was a country whose name he didn’t know, a street whose name he couldn’t read. One shot sent their car tumbling off the road into the water. He dropped his rifle in exchange for something smaller, much more practical.  
She’d dragged them both—her and her charge—onto the shore, red lines etched across her cheeks. There was another color, something much brighter, that made him wonder. But he didn’t hesitate and felt his finger squeeze.  
The woman had been shielding the target with her body as they crawled. She jerked back as the bullet struck her, then went out and into the second body. Red blossomed from just above her belt.  
He had to confirm. Or, at least, that’s the excuse he gave himself when he came closer.  
She watched him approach with a blank expression, ice cold but warm with blood. Clutching her wound, the woman tilted her head up as he stood over her, his hands tight around his weapon and the mask shielding the little human left to see.  
She should shoot him, duck behind the body, grab her gun, point, shoot. He could see in her eyes that she knew it, too. But instead the woman sat there, staring, weak and resilient.  
For a moment he grasped an answer to a question he had long forgotten.  
Her mouth was moving into two words, simple and driving and full of the forgotten.  
“Confirmed kill.”  
He brought his chin up, not quite a nod, and turned and left her there, her hand pressed against her skin and her face drowning in two shades of red.  
They let him be that evening. He sat in the dark room tossing a knife up in the air, watching how the thin strip of light from under the door reflected on it. He thought about her. He thought about choices.  
Her face found another: a blond man with an eager smile and a bright light in his eyes. It hurt to think about him, to think about them both. It was like…falling…yes, he was falling. Their faces were growing smaller and he blinked rapidly to bring them back. They slipped from his grasp, even when he clenched his fingers so tight his palm bled.  
When they came to get him, he asked. ‘What are they?’ The new man in the suit, a man with blond hair and thick glasses and a way with words, answered him.  
“They’re memories,” he said, his voice soft, a whisper.  
He nodded.  
“They’re unnecessary.”  
They sat him in the chair. The man stayed and watched.  
He slept again for a long time.


End file.
